Interactive computer gaming has become extremely popular. For example, Sony's EyeToy® was the first mass-market application to enable a user to control a game through the use of a camera which captured the user's physical movements. Nintendo's Wii™ included controllers that detected the movements of a user's hands during game play through the use of accelerometers and infrared detection.
In general, the data obtained by these hardware devices is noisy, and it is difficult to interpret a user's movements based only on the raw data as input. Many image processing techniques have been developed to take frames generated by a camera and interpret them, but the tracking of a user's body movements with these techniques has met with only limited success. In addition, the nature of the data can be insufficient when parts of the user's body block the line of sight to the camera of other parts of the user's body.
Gesture detection systems exist which use a start and end point to define the time span of a gesture, and the positional data acquired between the start and end points are compared with a set of known gestures. However, the disadvantage to this type of system is that the beginning and end points of the gesture must be known before attempting to classify the gesture.